"Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand--that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us."
~ Annie Dillard, "An Expedition to the Pole"

21 July 2008

Rilke and self-identity

If you have ever read W G Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, you will realise that this cult book of the 1990s is heavily influenced by the Malte Laurids notebooks. Rilke completed it in 1909, when he was 34.

The book takes the form of meditations by a young Danish aristocrat, living a lonely and impoverished life in Paris and observing the extraordinary street "characters" of that city. [...]

The central question of the book is self-identity. It ends with a retelling of the Prodigal Son, who runs away from home precisely to escape being loved on his family's uncongenial terms. In his return, he wonders whether he is ready for the love of God - about which, in his reading of St Teresa of Avila, he has already meditated.

He wonders, moreover, whether God is ready to love him. If I had to teach creative writing, I think I would use this book as a text.

So many bad books - either novels or autobiographies - charge artlessly into their theme, assuming that the author's soul is (a) interesting and (b) self-evidently existent.

Rilke's prose masterpiece reminds us of the questionability of either statement.

“There are those who maintain that you can't demand anything of the reader. They say the reader knows nothing about art, and that if you are going to reach him, you have to be humble enough to descend to his level. This supposes that the aim of art is to teach, which it is not, or that to create anything which is simply a good-in-itself is a waste of time. Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it. We hear a great deal about humility being required to lower oneself, but it requires an equal humility and a real love of the truth to raise oneself and by hard labor to acquire higher standards.” ~ Flannery O'Connor